One of the best safeguards to independence is to withdraw from the audit engagement entirely. Fortunately, that’s not the only solution.
gao
Parallelism and Paul Simon
Make your audit reports more dynamic by using parallelism: Similar words, phrases, bulleted lists and other grammatical elements to emphasize similar ideas in a sentence.
Independence is Required of a CPA Performing Yellow Book Audits
It is no surprise that independence is required of a CPA performing Yellow Book audits, but what does surprise many CPAs is how directly the GAO addresses one bad habit that CPA’s continue to engage in.
What is the job of an auditor?
Auditors, I suggest you keep your job title on the down-low when meeting someone new at a party. Why? Because just as soon as you reveal you are an auditor, your new acquaintance will get very quiet. Shortly thereafter, your not-yet (and likely will-never-be) friend will leave to get a drink and never come back. […]
Ethical guidelines for auditors
The GAO’s ethical guidelines for auditors remind us who we are and why we do what we do. And this is a very good thing, because it is easy to get balled up in the details of our day-to-day work and, forgetting the bigger picture of who we are and what we do, take the […]
The Difference Between Fraud, Waste and Abuse
The difference between fraud, waste and abuse is a matter of degrees. Only fraud is a reportable condition under Yellow Book standards.
Focus on a narrow audit objective
The 2018 version of the Yellow Book mentions audit objectives 163 times in one chapter on performance audits! That tells me that objectives run the show! And you know, the broader your audit objective, the longer your audit becomes and the harder your audit report is to write. A few years ago, I created […]
Blending the Green Book with the Yellow Book
Objectives: Identify the purpose of the GAO’s Green Book. Distinguish between components of internal control. Distinguish between management objectives Choose a finite subject matter on which to apply controls Identify the auditor’s responsibilities regarding application of the Green Book Most of the changes between the 2011 Yellow Book and the 2018 Yellow Book that we […]
Yellow Book Ethics
Enjoy this excerpt from the self-study text: The Yellow Book Interpreted which qualifies for 15 hours of CPE. The GAO has a few things to say about a government auditor’s ethical responsibilities and, thus, added a large section on ethics to the 2007 revision of the Yellow Book. The same ethical principles appear in the 2017 […]
Yellowbook-CPE.com is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) as a sponsor of continuing professional education on the National Registry of CPE Sponsors. State boards of accountancy have final authority on the acceptance of individual courses for CPE credit. Complaints regarding registered sponsors may be submitted to the National Registry of CPE Sponsors through its website: